Performance ideas

[Guest]

I am programming a physically larger part.

 

When I click on the menus to pick drive surfaces or check surfaces or edit and parameters I am seeing lags of a couple of minutes in some cases.

 

Accept drive surface, wait a minute while the syetm chugs away, click on check surfaces, accept, wait on the system to chug away, pick on the containment boundary, wait on the system to chug away.

 

All of my geometry is prepped and it has taken over 20 minutes JUST to pick it for cutting

 

Other files are fine, granted they are not a large, it is just this file it seems

[Ployd]

Never seen that. We do large stuff here and only see the delays when creating the toolpath. Not when picking surfaces.

[Guest]

Just got the can allocate memory for toolpath functions.

 

It's using almost 1.2 gigs of system memory

[Thee Rickster ™]

John,

 

what type of file was it and what native file

created it?

[Guest]

quote:

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what type of file was it and what native file created it?

---

I can not say for certain.

 

CATIA if I HAD to guess

[Thee Rickster ™]

iges, stp, or para solid

 

I had a 24 meg parasolid that had similar issues

i translated out of solidworks as an iges and

it made a huge difference even though it was a 78

meg iges

 

maybe try that or stp.

 

if its is taking you taht long to task might be

worth a shot...

[Guest]

Kannon sugeested surfaces. I am tired been staring at this file all day.

 

surfaces are behaving MUCH better

[Kannon]

get some night night... save something to do in the morning

[Guest CNC Apps Guy 1]

I've seen this behaviour when doing transform ops of simple contour, pocket, and drill cycles..., well, transforms of transforms than are transformed...

[Bruce Caulley]

This used to be a problem for me too. Physically large solid, but not necessarily large "meg" wise.

 

I used surfaces also and deleted the solid. Even having the solid blanked with no toolpaths referencing it would slow everything to a crawl.

 

Bruce

[MLS]

+1 to Kannon.

 

Typically I have a solid and create only the surfaces I am driving from it. Occaisionally I will dump the solid out of the file too if it gets cumbersome.

 

I don't use solid toolpaths. Got into the groove of this and found it saves alot of time on the bigger parts with no real loss on smaller ones.

[Kannon]

I finally got to help the "Post xxxxe"

[Kannon]

quote:

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I used surfaces also and deleted the solid. Even having the solid blanked with no toolpaths referencing it would slow everything to a crawl.

---

Bruce..have you tried putting the solid on a different level and turning it off? I like to keep my solid in case of any revisions.. I hate it when I open a file and find that I need to alter a radius and now it is only a surface. Much easier to modify it as a solid then turn to surfaces again and reselect the geometry for toolpaths in my opinion.

I dont know if it lags the system by putting the solid on a different level and shutting it off or not. need a test..

[Bruce Caulley]

Kannon,

Solid on a different layer and off gave same results.

 

Bruce

[Guest]

Maybe it is a size thing Bruce, I kept the solid in the file but on a level turned off and performance went WAAAAAAYYYYYYY up, for me at least.

[3R!< W3NG3R]

John, I have also noticed that large parts slow mine down. Once I imported a metric file that didn't convert for some reason and the part was about 40 ft long. Computer seamed to freeze up. Once I got it scaled everything was back to normal.

[DavidB]

You need to get a bigger monitor John.

This will make the solid smaller and give better processing time.

[Dave Ball]

check the shaded settings maybe. I noticed that shaded outlined slows my system down alot compared to just shaded when using solids.

[Hardmill]

Im working with a solid model right now that I couldnt

get any toolpaths(surface) to work.

Was giving me fits. I deleted it and imported it and

brought in as only surfs and all is well.

 

I rarely ever use solids to drive surface toolpaths

for just this reason.

 

 

PEACE

[Kannon]

quote:

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Was giving me fits. I deleted it and imported it and

brought in as only surfs and all is well.

---

did you try moving the solid to different a different level and shut it off...

 

does it help?

 

dont act like your to busy to try either..

[cobra95kev]

I just had a file that was getting large and slow and I copied it and then ran no history on all of my solids and converted all of them to surfaces and use them as drive geo and deleted almost all of the solids out of the file and my files size went down by about 1/3 and it responds quicker now too.

 

Later,

[Zoober]

I routinely run parts over 40-60". The biggest problem solvers are:

a) All wire on a different level. Turned off till needed.

Solids regen much slower than surfaces. Turned off till needed.

c) No outline on shading. EVER

d) RAM Saver is your friend. If/when you start getting goofy "checkered overlay" looking shading, it's time to run again.

e) Biggest improvement is running Ramdisk Plus, and setting temp and regen directories to that ramdisk location. Regens, level on/off. redraws time dropped < 1/2.

[Hardmill]

quote:

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dont act like your to busy to try either..

---

I really am busy, only got time for a quick :EYE GOUGE:

here and there.

 

 

PEACE

[Matthew Hajicek - Singularity]

I figure you've probably got this covered, but since nobody mentioned it what's your shading chord height set to?

[Jeremy Grigsby]

Does it have anything to do with the type of surfaces mastercam is set up to create? I'm having the same problem with a 25 inch long 5.5 dia model that i essentially wraped a 7/16 round bar around with a 1.75 lead helix. I did a boolean add to combine them and then I converted the solid to surfaces. I did alt-s to shade and it started thinking. I came back 20 minutes later and it hadn't shaded it yet. The cpu was pegger at 25% (a great advantage to having a quad core, 1 core is used) Then I got a bunch of out of ram errors because mcam was using 230mb of the 2gb system ram. I eventually just had to alt-ctrl-del out of it because it didn't seem as it was ever going to respond. I thought this would be a quick turn-around on just running a basic time check program, but not at all. Half the day back and forth and never even had a chance to tool it. I guess I just need to stay away from solids and surfaces unless someone has a workaround. I tried loading the file after the mu2 update but it did the same thing. I created everything entireley in Mcam.